Favorites from Fuzzy Monster
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Sixteen Years
After 16 years of doing a bit of everything under the sun here, I’m stepping away from the day to day of running MetaFilter and moving into the background. Never fear, I’m leaving it in the best of hands and things are looking good for the future.
small zeppelin
Kashmir + The Ocean
performed by 50-plus percussive pre-teens. Straight outa Louisville. Note the seriousness of purpose.
A sweet, young woman’s voice narrates.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice Screenplay [.pdf]
Warner Bros. has made the For Your Consideration draft of the full screenplay available for download via: indiewire.com.
"I Think It's Time. Again."
25 years after first seeing light as a 6-page story in RAW(Prev), Richard McGuire expanded his time and space-spanning Here to a 300-page novel. In Five Dials Magazine's 35th issue, Richard McGuire Makes a Book, "sketches, notes, phrases, inspirations, paintings, lists and photo collages used to create the essential Here," are presented for your enjoyment and edification.
Another frantic day of trading at the New York Sock Exchange
It was 30 years ago today, Dan Piraro made "Bizarro" de...but.
One of a bunch of "Far Side Copies" (and with a name borrowed from a Superman comics character), it may have never reached Gary Larson levels of success, but it stayed away from LOOKING like a copy, and almost 11,000 daily panels later, it still frequently lives up to its name.
Viper
Buried deep within a labyrinthine maze of broken links, hastily formatted webpages, Youtube videos with less than 5,000 views, there is transcendent internet magic just waiting for someone stumble onto it and share it with the world.
Enter Viper and “You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Smoke Crack,” which the Chicago Reader highlighted last week both for its idiosyncratic sonics and creative approach to grammar. It’s a title that demands attention but it’s also a hell of a trip, a hypnotic anchor oozing with ominous, sluggish menace via Viper’s tar pit bubble of a voice and that glitchy, needle-stuck-on-the-record “beat.”
Classic Animation Remixed
While Adult Swim is generally regarded as the pioneer of irreverent short-form animation -- especially for 'toons that reimagine past hits -- it wasn't always the king. In fact, the late-night programming block arguably found its birth in a series of short toons and interstitials that ran in the heyday of its daytime alter ego, the venerable Cartoon Network. The brainchild of C.N. Creative Director Michael Ouweleen and Hanna-Barbera chief Fred Seibert, these cartoons reinterpreted the network's properties through stock footage, indie music, and original animation in a wide variety of styles, as well as introducing prototypes of characters that would become some of the most famous in the history of American animation. (warning: monster post inside)
A Constant Drizzle of Disappointment
The Real Roots of Midlife Crisis
In The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch writes about why the forties are such a hard age for so many people.
Long ago, when I was 30 and he was 66, the late Donald Richie told me: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at your life and think, Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at your life again and think, Actually, this is pretty good.”(Previously on Metafilter: another thoughtful essay by Rauch.)
HFR till end of the world confirmed
When CNN launched in 1980, then-owner Ted Turner bragged that the 24-hour cable channel wouldn't sign off until the world ended--and would play "Nearer My God to Thee" when it did. It turns out he wasn't kidding: This Is The Video CNN Will Play When The World Ends
The Most Surreal Season
In 1959, iconic Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí agreed to design several holiday greeting cards for Hallmark, "with several stipulations. He asked for $15,000 [$122,200 in 2014 dollars] in cash in advance for 10 greeting card designs, with no suggestions from Hallmark for the subject or medium, no deadline and no royalties."
Jan Terri for the holidays
Chicago's own Jan Terri offers up her version of "Ave Maria" paired with an interpretive video for your Xmastime enjoyment
mefi2book
I've created a script that converts a Metafilter thread into a PDF designed for printing in book form, including title page and contributor index. I used lulu.com to print a few and they look pretty good.
The art of making a book, in various forms
The art of making a book (original video on Facebook, without added music) takes you through the traditional manual process of bookbinding, from selecting and setting the individual letters to finally binding the book in leather and adding finishing touches. If you'd like to try your hand at something similar but with some modern flourishes, there are plenty of tutorials and guides, linked below.
It's A Licensed Character Christmas
For use spreading misery and pain during this holiday season, have a heaping shovelful of bad bad 80s Chrismas cartoon specials. Hail Grinch!
He-Man & She-Ra's Christmas Special (YouTube 44m)
Christmas Comes To Pac-Land (Dailymotion 23m)
The Wacky 12 Days of Christmas (YouTube 24m) (with Phil Hartman)
And the one that inspired this post, the amazing Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (YouTube 23m) That is to say, the Wacky Wallwalker Christmas Special. Written by Mark Evanier!
After the break... TWENTY-ONE MORE OF THESE THINGS. You're welcome!
He-Man & She-Ra's Christmas Special (YouTube 44m)
Christmas Comes To Pac-Land (Dailymotion 23m)
The Wacky 12 Days of Christmas (YouTube 24m) (with Phil Hartman)
And the one that inspired this post, the amazing Deck the Halls with Wacky Walls (YouTube 23m) That is to say, the Wacky Wallwalker Christmas Special. Written by Mark Evanier!
After the break... TWENTY-ONE MORE OF THESE THINGS. You're welcome!
It's Genetic
It's Genetic was a short series of one-panels comics by Kyle Baker (more) that ran in Marvel Age. via.
You must know thrilling things before you can write about them
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used "terrible" six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. A year before his death, James Bond author Ian Fleming explained how to write a thriller.
Weird Buzzfeed
Perhaps you've heard of Weird Twitter, the loosely-organized network of Twitter users with origins in Something Awful's FYAD sub-forum.
But have you heard of FeedBuzz, Weird Twitter's take on 'listicle'-hosting sites like BuzzFeed? In the listicle spirit, below are five FeedBuzz articles you won't want to miss.
16,000 amphetamine-fueled, stream-of-consciousness words
"It was the greatest piece of writing I ever saw, better'n anybody in America, or at least enough to make Melville, Twain, Dreiser, Wolfe, I dunno who, spin in their graves." After reading Neal Cassady's 16,000 word letter, Jack Kerouac threw out his draft of On the Road and started over, in the style he's now famous for. Ginsberg took the letter and lost it. Kerouac thought it had fallen over the side of a house boat. But now the Joan Anderson letter has been found.
Unpublished Coffee Table Books
Over the years I have taken countless photos perhaps under the deluded belief that if I don’t visually document everything then those very things won’t exist because I have a magic camera and enchanted iPhone. Or maybe because I just like to take pictures. Either way, it has resulted in me having an untold number of images that I have time and time again organized into coffee table books that remain unpublished because of The Man (or because my own publisher wishes to remain profitable).
Hazlitt's love letter to MetaFilter
The Internet’s First Family by Stephen Thomas at Hazlitt takes a "historical" (recent history that is!) view of MetaFilter. Don't go all gooey when you read it.
via Phire's tweet
Do you like vintage training/educational fims? Meet Jeff Quitney.
Jeff Quitney has curated hundreds and hundreds* of YouTube playlists with thousands and thousands of vintage educational, training and institutional films and documentaries. If you hate multi-link posts you can jump right in because the playlists aren't organized. In addition to including extensive background information and links to other resources in the video descriptions, he has restored or improved the video and audio in most of the films. Space, the military, and biology are well represented, but so are pets, food, and outdoor recreation and survival. Armchair travelers will be able to travel around the world, but you can also stay at home and watch cartoons. Travel back in time for the latest breaking newsreels, and add your own weather reports from vintage USAF meteorology films. And if you like women’s tennis, then you’ve just hit the motherlode.*I stopped counting at 480
The Force Is Strong With This Dad
When a seven-year-old girl wants to be Han Solo for Halloween, what's her father to do? Dress as Princess Leia, of course.
A post about a short film that cannot be described in 72 characters.
Circle of an Abstract Ritual is the latest stop motion timelapse from artist Jeff Frost (previously)who creates short films that defy description. This latest work gathers hundreds of thousands of photographs taken over the last two years during wildfires, riots, and inside abandoned houses where he created a series of optical illusion paintings. Frost says the film “began as an exploration of the idea that creation and destruction might be the same thing,” and that it is in part “a way to get an ever so slight edge on the unknowable.” [via]
The Good, the Bad, and the Nights Watch
The theme from GoT covered as a western, à la Ennio Morricone.
Star Trek in Widescreen
"I was able to create these shots by waiting for the camera to pan and then I stitched the separate shots together. The result is pretty epic. It reminds me of the classic science fiction movies of the 50’s and 60’s. Suddenly the show has a 'Forbidden Planet' vibe." [via]
All the colors of the Pixar galaxy
ROYGBIV (Single Link Vimeo, 1:28)
Dirty dancing to their own drummers: another music video without music
Start with the well-known final dance scene from Dirty Dancing, remove the original score and add in new foley as if the couple was closely mic'd, and you have something the sounds like a one-on-one basketball game with giggling and popping balloons, and then Castle (Swayze) leaps from the stage and really gets his thing going. This is just one of a great number of musicless music videos, from Mario Wienerroither and others.
Spicing traditional realism with enchantments of popular page-turners
"The weakness underlines the biggest trap of time machine fiction: with its emphasis on patterns and symbols, it's always in danger of devolving into a kind of interpretative game, a lit-crit mystery whose meanings must be decrypted rather than naturally perceived. Authors unbounded by time are susceptible to the allures of omniscience, which can turn their characters into puppets and snuff out the lifelike vitality of the realist tradition." Sam Sacks at Prospect Magazine writes about the rise of time machine fiction.
Being a comedian means knowing a lot of people who've committed suicide.
"My count is now up to five. Five of my friends and fellow comedians have taken their own life. It's shocking, but, sadly, not surprising. Non-comedians — or as we call them, 'civilians' — are always surprised. And I am always surprised they're so surprised. They have yet to realize the Two Big Things all comedians know." [may be triggering]
What in the hell is country funk? Here are 33 tracks for reference
Here's a song I didn't know existed until summer 2007, when Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin released an impeccably curated three-CD mix (full 4 hours on Mixcloud). Halfway through the first disc, the music slipped into an easy, loping groove, sunburned and hungover, and a regretful voice offered Otis Blackwell's lonesome lyric: "You know I can be found/ Sitting home all alone …" [Billy Swan's version of "Don't Be Cruel" is] a beautiful record, though, and utterly different from Elvis's 1956 recording. And it opens a fantastic collection of country funk songs, collected and remastered by Zach Cowie of Light in the Attic Records. More sounds below the break.
24. A house designed by a three-year-old is built.
1. A book describes works that the author has conceived but not brought into being.
2. The world is drawn from memory. There are missing countries, altered borders.
It's called Vindaloo.
Stickman's Tips for Having a Table at a Comic Book Convention is actually a pretty good primer for having a booth or table at any convention, ever.
Turns out that BUTTS LOL looks super classy in the Captain Sky Hawk font
The President has been kidnapped by ninjas. Are you a bad enough dude to render text in a variety of sweet-as-hell video game typefaces using Arcade Font Writer?
$haw$hank
In 1994, The Shawshank Redemption made just $18 million at the box office. It got seven Academy Award nominations, but won zero. And yet, it has become one of the most consistently profitable movies there is, including providing some of its actors with what Bob Gunton (the evil Warden Norton) calls "a very substantial income" in residuals.
The best job application ever!
Eudora Welty at 23
March 15, 1933
Gentlemen,
I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.
March 15, 1933
Gentlemen,
I suppose you’d be more interested in even a sleight-o’-hand trick than you’d be in an application for a position with your magazine, but as usual you can’t have the thing you want most.
I bet this FPP is even scarier inside!
"Looking back on it, one of the things that's crazy is I don't think I even realized that first of all, Joe Flaherty is supposed to be a vampire but he's howling like a werewolf. [laughs] I just took that for granted, and it must've been years until I saw it and was like "Wait a minute, that's a joke!" Furthermore, Count Floyd's always wearing a turtleneck which is the least vampire thing ever." "Splitsider kicks off its new column, Sketch Anatomy, with television writer Bill Oakley breaking down SCTV’s "Dr. Tongue’s Evil House of Pancakes" (previously). Oww owww oowoooooo!!!
TURTLES ON OPRAH
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on "The Oprah Winfrey Show".
A slight bit of context can be found on Tumblr.
The poet who vanished
The poet Rosemary Tonks turned her back on the literary world in the mid-1970s, leaving behind her a handful of strange and brilliant poems and a small band of devoted admirers who longed to know what had happened to her. For forty years she disappeared completely, 'evaporated into air like the Cheshire Cat', as Brian Patten remarked in a 2009 BBC documentary, The Poet Who Vanished. Now, with news of her death at the age of 85, the story of her life is starting to emerge.